A good day to bury bad news. A terrible day to launch Huffington Post UK

Poor Arianna Huffington. When she and her advisors picked today to launch the British version of the Huffington Post they couldn't have known it would be eclipsed by the biggest media story of the year. This would have been a good day to bury bad news, but it's not a good day to launch HuffPost UK.

It's a little premature to judge, but it doesn't look that promising. The main problem is that it's too obviously a minor offshoot of the American version, with not enough attention paid to anglicising it. The banner headline this morning (it's subsequently been changed) was an American colloquialism: “The buck stops here.” This was above a picture of Rebekah Brooks so I'm sure most readers got the point, but still. Couldn't the headline writer have come up with something more British-sounding?

There are also two examples of American English on the home page – and to add insult to injury, they’re both written by people who should know better. In Arianna's editorial launching the UK edition, she says she just lerves our lil’ ol’ country because she went to “college” here. In fact, she went to Cambridge. Cambridge isn’t a “college”, it's a collection of 31 colleges. The other, marginally less egregious example is provided by Tracey Ulman, another ex-pat. In a hagiographic piece about, yes, you've guessed it, Arianna Huffington, she refers to the fact that her glorious leader “dated” Bernard Levin when she lived in England. Don’t you mean “went out with”, Tracey?

Another indication that not enough effort has been put in to anglicising the product is the inclusion of lots of pieces that clearly originated in America. There's an article by Tom Zeller Jr. on poor air quality, for instance, that bears an uncanny resemblance to this piece that appeared in America two days earlier. Tom Zeller Jr. is clearly someone who's concerned about the environment, but does he really have to take recycling to these lengths?

Judging from today's edition, HuffPost UK intends to take a leaf out of its American mother ship and include lots of posts by minor celebrities – Ricky Gervais and Sarah Brown, for instance. I’m not sure there’s as much interest in what celebs have to say about current affairs over here. Arianna has lived in America for such a long time, she's probably forgotten that our attitude to the rich and famous isn't quite so craven. We like stuff about celebrities – preferably stuff which embarrasses them – but not by them.

This failure to differentiate the British version of the HuffPost from its American counterpart suggests that the UK operation is pretty threadbare, with the bulk of the editing being done across the Atlantic. The Huffington Post has been described as “a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates” thanks to the army of unpaid volunteers that keep it afloat, many of them contributors. Are there fewer people willing to work for nothing over here? I was approached by HuffPost UK last month to see if I'd be interested in writing for the site and when I asked what their word rate was I got this reply: "Sadly, no one gets paid to blog for Huff Post, so I couldn't offer you anything." Perhaps it was easier for Arianna to recruit galley slaves when she launched the American edition. It's a little galling to be asked to work for free, when Arianna herself has just netted $315 million from the sale of the Huffington Post in America. She wasn't working on it for free. Why should I or anyone else?

There is one respect in which HuffPost UK differs from the US version: it's not nearly so Left-wing. There are at least as many contributions from Conservative MPs as there are from Labour MPs and the headline on one story reads: "Public sector workers paid 8% more than their private sector counterparts." That's a headline you might easily come across in Telegraph Blogs. Has Arianna decided that HuffPo UK should be less partisan? There's a paragraph in her editorial which suggests she has:

Part of this editorial vision is putting an end to seeing every issue through the tired frame of right versus left. There is nothing right or left about obsessively covering youth unemployment, or the struggles of working families, or the war in Afghanistan.

Is this a smart move? Last April, I wrote a blog post in which I said the problem Arianna would face in the UK was the dearth of decent, Left-wing bloggers. Perhaps she took this on board and has re-invented the HuffPost as a non-partisan publication over here. Or perhaps she just licked her finger, stuck it in the air and decided the wind is now blowing in a rightwards direction. Ultimately, though, news-y, current affairs-y blogs like the Huffington Post do better when they take sides. It helps them attract an audience and makes for lively debates with bloggers on the other side. In the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the British media, the HuffPost UK looks awfully like an online version of the Independent.